NOËL DOLLA

restructurations spatiales • spatial restructurings

(1969-2016)

Black Jack Editions 2017

 Rachel Stella
OU COMMENT NOËL
VOLA DE SES AILES

156
UP UP AND AWAY WITH NOËL
Dear Noël,
In the back matter of all your catalogs, the Restructurations
spatiales are invariably listed as your earliest solo
exhibitions. These actions were accomplished in 1969 and
1970, some 2000 meters above sea level, in the Authion
massif of the Alps. The only spectators for the inaccessible
and now vanished works were particularly devoted friends,
a few physically fit artists and writers from the Nice area,
buzzards, eagles, chamois, marmots, perhaps some roe deer
and wild boar. Not even the buzzards wrote about what they
saw. Yet the Restructurations spatiales are indelibly inscribed
in your vita. Does this reflect an artist’s conscious control
of his history or just the accumulation of data in haphazard
editorial circumstances?
There was no Restructuration spatiale n° 1. The critic
Jacques Lepage noted “a triptych of large monochrome
canvases constitutes Restructuration n° 1. It was never
exhibited”1.
Restructuration spatiale n° 2 was originally announced as
Propos neutre n° 2. You changed its name in a subsequent
statement. The announcement for this action, a polycopied
flyer, is not the most inviting. It reads like a young artist’s
attempt to generate some discourse for critical consumption.
You declare “the proposition is no longer the locator or the
localizing mark of a painted possibility, but simply the
accentuation of a spatial and mental restructuration,” and
question the “mental permutations and relationships that the
Viewer Actor establishes when confronted with the neutral
proposition”2.
The other side of this document displays a freehand diagram
indicating the road to the exhibition venue. Viewer Actors are
invited to rally at the Pointe des Trois Communes, dominating
the steep and barren valleys of the Roya, Cairos and Bevera
rivers. Forty-eight years later, you and I go looking for the site
where you brushed pink paint onto exposed rocks. Needless
to say, we did not find the localizing mark of a painted
possibility. Nor did I experience any accentuation of a spatial
and mental re-structuration. But in the course of the quest I
did gain insight into how this body of work emancipated you
from the regionalist influence of teachers, peers and the local
art world, Nice.
In February 1970 you wrote a statement for a group show.
Your participation is a 1968 work: Triptyque, sol, mur, espace,
composed of 3 painted cloths displayed on the wall, 3 on
the floor and 3 suspended from the ceiling. Interrogating
the space in which to display art is the central issue of this
statement. Your mind is clearly up in the Authion as you make
a distinction between artworks created on flat media and
conceived for specific spaces as opposed to those created for
the indeterminate spaces of nature. The argument rehashes
the Propos neutre, which in the process emerges retitled
Restructuration spatiale n° 2. By the time this text was
composed, Restructuration n° 3, the only winter intervention,
has been executed. Referencing both, you expound:
“Indeed, Nature becomes the medium of the artwork, and
integral to it only upon receiving the localizing mark of the
painting act.
These marks create:
the medium
visual spaces
a group of indeterminate spaces.
The viewer establishes visual and mental relationships”3.
This oddly parsed statement shows you mulling over
the relationship between a mental space in which art is
created and the physical space where it is perceived. If, as
you propose, Nature becomes the supporting medium for
your artistic intervention, then the limitations of pictorial
representation on a two dimensional support are no longer
operative. This is a radical critique not just of pictorial means
such as stretched canvas, but of the painting act. It is also an
intuition you share with practitioners of Land Art.
But at age 23, you’re not there yet. This 1970 statement
presents an alternative, more conceptualizing, response to
the spatial issue: “Now it becomes possible to make a Spatial
Reconstruction in which the Triptych would no longer be the
result of an optical impression, but due exclusively to Mental
Relationships. For example: a point in Nice, a point in Tokyo, a
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 point in New York. The point would be seen and apprehended
as a group, a mentally indissoluble Triptych”4.
A few years later (1976) you serve up a variant of this story
to Bernard Lamarche-Vadel. He enquired whether your action
could be considered as a phenomenological reduction of
the painting act. You fall into the ambuscade of his leading
question but pull yourself out with the used yarn: “I wanted
to reinforce the resonance [of the action] by enunciating a
fantasy: to mark three points on the globe: New York, Tokyo
and Nice.... Thus evoking the problem of space, of imaginary
limits, of obverse and reverse as the question arises: on what
side, what surface should we trace the triangle?”5 It takes
heavy earth moving equipment, Noël, to dig yourself out
of the booby trap of conceptual art. You succeed once you
dispose of the physical means to satisfy your fantasy. The film
documenting Restructuration spatiale n° 5 reveals you, a team
of assistants, and a bulldozer producing a triptych of points
on the beach in Nice that is no cosa mentale, but perhaps the
most impressive of all your outdoor artworks.
In the same 1976 interview, Lamarche-Vadel asks you to
describe your work between 1969 and 1971. You reply that, in
October 1969, it consisted of triads of painted rocks executed
at the crest of Mount Authion. You consider this action
tantamount to an exhibition even as it is a critique of an event
that took place earlier that summer in the nearby hilltop village
of Coaraze. Pieces by artists including Dezeuze, Pagès and
Saytour were, in your terms “administrated” by Claude Viallat
in an outdoor exhibition. You castigate their aspiration to take
art out of the studio as primarily demagogic:
“It was just an ideological displacement. I, on the other hand,
tried to draw out the economy between the representation I
was establishing and its place of emergence. I continued this
work in 1970 using snow as the supporting medium, taking
on considerable surface areas, marking them in a grouping of
three using round spots 30 meters in diameter spaced 150
meters apart. As the artwork consisted of its display, a precise
location was assigned as a condition for its visibility. Lastly, in
June 1970, I distributed in this same location, over a surface of
several hundred square meters, white discs 30 cm in diameter
as punctuations. Rather than encircling myself in the specific
description of each object, I prefer to note that the dots created
in the course of my works were merely the minimum markers
of a surface”6.
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Wow, Noël: vintage verbosity, pompous exaggeration, and a
contrary to fact statement.7 A photograph by Marcel Alocco
indicates that the snowy field you mark with one (not several)
group of three large circles in February is not the same
meadow where you toss the cake liners in June.8 The snow
is in an area called Camp d’Argent. Alocco’s wide shot of your
June action includes ruins of military barracks that are 10
km further up the road, near the pointe des Trois Communes,
where the invitation to the Propos neutre announced you
would be present on the 14th of June, 1970.
By 1989, without betraying the plastic ambitions of the
Restructurations spatiales, you distance yourself from their
conceptual pretensions by entombing the discourse in your
satirical manifesto, E.L.A.N. Primarily an apology for abstract
painting, this tract promotes your anagrammatic heteronyms,
including Lona Odell, “distant relation of Noel Odell, the last
person to have seen Irvine and Mallory disappear in the clouds
at the top of the Everest”. Mallory’s body finally reappeared
in 1999; the Restructurations spatiales emerge now from the
foggy prose of your early writing. They were recovered by Allan
Dool, whom you describe as born in London in 1946, and to
whom you attribute the authorship of all the Restructurations
spatiales. He concludes for you “Wherefore art thou nature? Or
the terrible necessity of the Madonna of the Rocks. Question:
what can one paint after Leonardo, Turner, Monet, Matisse,
Mondrian, Manzoni and G. Richter?”9 The allusion to your own
painted rocks as an artistic necessity supplies a clever answer
to a rhetorical question.
A question that continues to obsess you in 2000, when you
say “Nature is there to make the work seen; the work and the
landscape are one and the same at certain moments. The work
is made up of nature, and nature then becomes the material
and nature is the canvas; the tree, the rocks or the sky
become the color. The idea is that the whole gesture becomes
a painting”10. That art does not necessarily depict or describe
landscape (or any other visual fact) was already an acceptable
idea, even in 1969. It is at the heart of any conception of
abstract painting. To affirm that nature can be a canvas, or
pictorial support, would also have been recognized by your
peers investigating all the charms of unstretching, folding,
reversing and piercing the picture plane. What you were
unable to verbalize convincingly until this moment is that the
early Restructurations proposed a conflation between art and
landscape that eliminated the picture plane from the picture.
No more screen between viewer and viewed. No more conflict
between support and surface. Unlike your peers airing their
paintings in Coaraze or taking them on vacation for Eté 70, you
were doing something different than simply innovating with
materials and finding new exhibition venues for traditionally
modern art.
By the time you engage in Restructuration spatiale n° 3,
you’ve given a lot of thought to recording your projects.
Martin Miguel, who helped you achieve the action in the snow,
remembers going to wait in the car while you undertook a full
blown “reportage photographique”11. Beguiling spectacles
that highlight vistas, dramatic perspectives and richly varied
passages of hue and tone: all the esthetic conventions of
a postcard. These images lack indices pointing to the date,
place or other relevant documentary information. Surely the
audience you convoked to a slide show at Marcel Alocco’s
found them more entertaining than snapshots of your
holidays12.
The integrity of the photographs is only an issue because
you insisted: “there was nothing to sell and that’s why
this proposition remained relatively unknown. I never
wanted photograph to be by-products of the work. I never
commercialized the photographs of the Restructurations
spatiales. The work remained that which it was made for: a
privileged moment of exchange outside the economic context,
out of the gallery, out of the museum. Back then, taking a
political and economic position was important to me”13. Since
when is the market an esthetic authority, Noël? I take you to
task because such deficient argumentation undermines the
formal legibility of the Restructurations. The esthetic interest
of getting the work out of galleries and museums is not that
you deprive it of value, but that you give it space. Outside,
where there is no authority to mediate between the viewer
and the artwork, it can be “a privileged moment of exchange”
regardless of its economic context.
Photographs of Restructuration spatiale n° 2 also fail in this
documentary intent. Yes, the bubblegum pink paint you used
stands out sharply in the color photographs; but not one
published image registers the triads of painted rocks. The
photographer seems to have been distracted by the allure
of the mountainscape. There is an even more intriguing
view of painted rocks which does not figure among the
Restructurations. Titled Rochers peints 1975, its caption notes
“action realized for the film Chercheurs d’Art”. The black and
white film still is not very sharp, but it caught my eye because
of its narrative impact: you are wearing a climbing harness.
You paint the rock face as a colleague secures you from
what looks like the top of a cliff. I’m a bit dubious: you seem
to be wearing socks and sandals on your feet, not stickies.
Not exactly Yves Klein leaping into the void, but the dramatic
situation invokes very avant-gardist art-into-life aspirations.
Does this eruption of the picturesque represent a momentary
lapse into romanticism, Noël? There is no particular analogy
of sensibility or intent between your treatment of landscape
and Romantic painting. The Restructurations do not aim
to simulate our experience of nature in order to distill an
experience of the sublime. They do not inform us about the
landscape, they inform it. Like abstract painting they have no
subject matter, they are the subject.
Yet no author takes them on as either the bedrock of your
work14. Only Alfred Pacquement evokes to visual analogies
between the Restructurations and what he calls a type of
institutionally and commercially successful Anglo-Saxon art15.
Was he thinking of the institutional consecration of Hamish
Fulton’s ramblings or the rewards reaped from Christo’s savvy
merchandising of site-specific projects? A better comparison
would relate the Restructurations to earlier examples of Land
Art. Without opening the door to anachronistic modes of
looking, take this coincidence. In February 1969, when you
were conceiving the painted rocks and hesitating between
giving them a more conceptual orientation as Propos neutre,
or a more visual intent as Restructuration spatiale n° 2, Dennis
Oppenheim, Robert Smithson and Robert Morris were among
the artists participating in the exhibition Earth Art at Cornell
University. The artists chosen by Willoughby Sharp created
pieces especially for the event; many were made outside,
scattered around the university campus and the surrounding
landscape of Ithaca, NY. In the exhibition catalog, Sharp
describes these works you knew nothing about in words that
nonetheless seem to qualify yours:
“In art’s escape from object orientation, the new sculpture
is trying to confront new issues, ones of vast scale, of open,
unstructured space and non-materialistic attitudes... The
iconic content of the work has been eliminated, and art is
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 gradually entering into a more significant relationship with the
viewer and the component parts of his environment”16.
Writing in 1978, after a decade of his own experiments, Robert
Morris discusses alternatives to making sculptural objects
that he finds in the outdoor art of his peers. His analysis could
also be applied to the Restructurations:
“Modernist issues of innovation and stylistic radicalism
seem to have nothing to do with these moves. More at issue
perhaps is a shift in valuation of experience. And although
the art in question gives up none of its knowledgeability or
sophistication in this shift, it nevertheless opens more than
other recent art to a surprising directness of experience.
This experience is embedded in the very nature of spatial
perception. Some of the thrusts of the new work are to make
these perceptions more conscious and articulate”17.
Since 1969 you have executed more than a dozen pieces
called Restructuration spatiale. Questioning whether they
all belong in this category merits some thought, Noël. The
analogies of the early Restructurations spatiales with Land
Art suggest restricting the title to outdoor artworks. Several
of the later ones, notably n° 6 and n° 7 include performance
aspects that deserve a longer discussion than we can have
here. So let me conclude with Restructuration spatiale n° 5.
You waited ten years after the Authion interventions before
turning your attention to Castel Plage, a site on the waterfront
in Nice. Like the mountain pieces, this urban beach project
was also a one-man show, but its execution was no solitary
enterprise. Commissioned by the City of Nice to coincide with
the opening of the show Tarlatanes at the municipal gallery,
the action was recorded by the City’s cinema service. The film
shows not only the human and material efforts required to
dig three very large holes into the beach’s black pebbles and
then completely color them with pigment, but also the crowds
of fascinated spectators. Clearly you achieved the aim of
reaching the Viewer Actor directly without the intermediary of
a supporting medium. Perhaps you even outdid your illustrious
predecessor, Yves Klein, who only dreamt of signing the Nice
sky18. As you said “My idea was that the gesture would become
a painting”19.
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1. Unpublished manuscript, Fonds Jacques Lepage. Institut Mémoire de
l’Edition Contemporaine, Caen.
2. See p. 22-23 of the present book.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, “Noël Dolla interview”, ±0, December 1976,
p. 39.
6. Ibid.
7. The pretentious style is actually Lamarche-Vadel’s invention,
acknowledge in the interview’s header. Op.Cit., p. 38.
8. Reproduced in Noël Dolla Entrée libre mais non obligatoire, Blackjack
éditions - Villa Arson, 2015, p. 348.
9. Noël Dolla : un leurre, Homère, cinq silences, un outil parfait, centre d’art
contemporarin de Vassiviere, 1998.
10. Elodie Antoine, Les Restructurations spatiales et les Tableaux d’Ecole,
M.A. Thesis in art history under the direction of Eric De Chassey,
Université François-Rabelais de Tours, 2000, p. 117.
11. Email to the author: 2 May 2017.
12. The projection took place on 14 March 1970 at the home of Marcel Alocco
and Hélène Alocco.
13. Elodie Antoine, op. cit., p. 118.
14. Except Fabrice Flahutez, whose thoughts were clearly crossing mine as
we wrote.
15. “... for French artists then did not grasp how to exploit the institutional
and commercial yield of immense marks in nature nor of ephemeral
sculptures constituted of elements randomly gathered whilst hiking, as
the Anglo-Saxons understood so well” Alfred Paquement, “Pas de fumée
sans feu” in Noël Dolla, op. cit., 1998, p. 19.
16. Willoughby Sharp et al, Earth Art, Andrew Dickson White Museum, Cornell
University, 1969, n.p.
17. Robert Morris, “The Present Tense of Space” in Continuous Project Altered
Daily, MIT Press, 1993, p. 176. Originally published in Art in America,
January 1978.
18. “I was to sign my name on the other side of the sky during a fantastic
‘realistico-imaginary’ journey. That day, as I lay stretched upon the beach
of Nice, I began to feel hatred for birds which flew back and forth across
my blue sky, cloudless sky, because they tried to bore holes in my
greatest and most beautiful work”. Yves Klein, Chelsea Hotel Manifesto,
1961.
19. Elodie Antoine, op. cit., 2000, p. 120.